FILM STILL Transformer 3 stills (Robert Zuckerman)
So Harold Camping got a few details about the Rapture wrong.
The Apocalypse arrives today in the form of “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” a movie guaranteed to strike worldwide audiences deaf and dumb with a cunning combination of a brain-dead script, lousy 3-D, ADD-addled edits, a pneumatic underwear model and a lot of things blowing up very, very loudly.
Director Michael Bay, Hollywood’s answer to the Antichrist, isn’t primarily interested in your soul, though his movie does a pretty effective job of sucking that away (and sucking, in general).
PHOTOS: ROSIE HUNTINGTON-WHITELEY
His primary goal is separating you from 15 dollars (in 3-D) for the privilege of watching a mainstream movie that’s only slightly easier to follow — and 16 minutes longer — than the art-house hit “The Tree of Life” and many, many, many decibels louder.
I miraculously survived a preview screening with a throbbing headache and slight nausea; others may not be so lucky.
He’s a seductive devil, that Bay.
He’s all but renounced this movie’s appalling 2009 predecessor and publicly promised that this one pays attention to such niceties as characterization.
And, Bay claims, he’s curbed his propensity for microsecond-long cuts to accommodate 3-D, which requires more time for your eyes to register an image. He further asserts that the 3-D is brighter and sharper than in other films using the process.
Don’t believe him. To use the technical terminology of my profession, that’s hooey, hooey and more hooey.
Bay and credited screenwriter Ehren Kruger (“Reindeer Games”) tease us with a pre-credits sequence revealing that President Nixon’s biggest cover-up wasn’t Watergate after all. When the US landed on the moon in 1969, the astronauts covertly recovered a crashed spaceship on the far side.
After a baffling visit to deserted, present-day Chernobyl by US troops led by Josh Duhamel, we’re in Washington, DC, where our hero Sam (Shia LaBeouf) is unemployed after receiving a medal from President Obama.
But he still has the hottest girlfriend in town. She’s played by thigh-flashing Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, whose “acting” makes her fired predecessor Megan Fox look like Meryl Streep by comparison.
The promised “characterization” consists of painful hamming from such fine actors as Frances McDormand (“You can’t just bring weapons of mass destruction into our atmosphere!”), John Malkovich and John Turturro. And then there’s a beyond-stupid scene in which Sam is caught in a compromising position in the men’s room with Ken Jeong, the Asian-stereotype specialist of “Hangover” fame.
Patrick Dempsey also chews all available scenery as the chief human bad guy. Dr. McDreamy is not only the model’s employer and would-be boyfriend, but also serves as the public-relations counselor for an army of Decepticons — the bad Transformers — launched from that long-ago moon landing (I think).
President Obama is so cowed by the Decepticons that he exiles Optimus Prime and the rest of the good-guy Autobots from Earth — till the Decepticons demolish the Lincoln Memorial.
That’s merely a prelude to Bay and the Decepticons laying waste to Chicago for something like 40 minutes.
I had no idea why they were doing this, or why soldiers would want to rappel down the side of a collapsing glass skyscraper. It may look cool, but this defies all laws of physics and logic.
Fortunately — or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view — this sequence puts Huntington-Whiteley in form-fitting jeans that don’t afford the ogling upskirt views in her earlier scenes.
She registers terror at being menaced by Decepticons with all the conviction of a young woman who’s been told she’ll have to wait another 10 minutes for her manicure.
That’s probably irrelevant in a movie so confusingly frenetic that it looks like it was edited by a 5-year-old after consuming three bowls of LSD-laced Cap’n Crunch.
At the screening I was at, many shots were so dim that I frequently had to remove my 3-D glasses to determine whether it was supposed to be day or night. Between the 3-D and the assaultive noise level — lots of metal-on-metal action and explosions — I felt my brain had been rewired by the end of 21/2 hours.
Box-office experts predict the much-hyped flick will lure teens who have largely deserted movie theaters this year.
That’s entirely possible, and would in some ways represent the End of Days for Hollywood filmmaking as we know it.
But then, the prognosticators might be as wrong as Camping — “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” could underperform, serving as the final nail in the coffin for the waning 3-D format.
lou.lumenick@nypost.com